Beekeeping, failure, & community
In homesteading, you have to be willing to fail at things. It’s easy to forget that every successful gardener picked up their skill by failing - learning what did not work, then trying again until they figured out what does. Still, it’s our nature to want to be good at things we try. I’ve done my share of failing, but we’ve been relatively successful in our first few years of shifting our lifestyle as homesteaders. I’ve gone from no gardening knowledge to still not much, but enough to grow baskets full of food each year. Most of our birds are a few years old now, happy and healthy, and still producing more eggs than we can eat. Beekeeping was a totally different story.
This venture was a long time in the making. I first decided I wanted to keep bees while I was studying biology in undergrad, when mass die-offs of bees were a hot topic and I was educated for the first time about how important pollinators such as honeybees are for food production. I was in no position in 2014 to keep bees, I seemed to change apartments and roommates every 6 months, so I folded that dream up & tucked it away.
Last year at Christmas time, when my husband asked me what I wanted, I pulled it back out and told him I wanted a beehive. Seeing it sitting around the house, I thought, would be the push I needed to make it happen. He got me the beehive; he put it together and I was giddy at the sight of it under our tree.
Keeping honeybees is definitely the most complicated and high-stakes endeavor I have taken on thus far. There is so much to know, and even the most trusted books and speakers’ advice can let you down because, as they say, “the bees don’t read the books.” I did read the books, however, and the books all suggested finding a local association with which to get started. Serendipitously, around the same time in January, an acquaintance shared a Facebook post about a free beginners’ beekeeping class hosted by the local beekeeping supply store. When I called the number on the post, a friendly, chatty Southern man answered the phone. He was excited to talk about bees and signed me up for one of his upcoming classes. The class was maybe two hours long, and I remember it was a cold and windy day sitting behind the store with the older couple who picked the same day to take it. I took plenty of notes. At the end of the class, the host (who I now know is named Greg) invited us to attend the local beekeepers association meetings. He gave us the date and let us know we still had a few months before he would have nucs - small starter bee colonies. Another problem solved! I had not really been sure where to get bees or how to even know what you’re looking for.
My husband Esten and I attended our first beekeepers’ association meeting that month, and we continue to attend them monthly. I took more notes, and we joined the other association members for a hive inspection day out at Greg’s property. I ordered 2 nucs to be delivered in April, and the clock had started on our preparations. Esten spent many hours chopping and digging and clearing the corner of our property for the hives. I buried myself in bee books every night before bed, trying to make sense of all the new terminology.
On April 13th, it was time to pick up our colonies. We arrived at the rural property about 15 minutes north of ours just after dark and joined line of trucks that had formed waiting for their bees. It was such a novel experience for me, driving up to the pallets stacked high with nuc boxes, watching them be loaded one by one into truck beds by men in full bee suits. They took our tickets, loaded up our nucs, and wished us luck.
Esten had to work the next day, so I was on my own for the installation. I was nervous. Something I haven’t mentioned yet: I found out after already committing that both my dad and my half-brother are moderately allergic. Dr. Google says bee venom allergies are typically not hereditary. To bee on the safe side, I spoke with my doctor, who wrote me a prescription for a couple of epipens to keep on hand, just in case I or anyone else should need them.
We dealt with some challenges in our first few months. One of the hives was stronger than the other, and the weaker hive appeared to have lost its queen about six weeks after I installed them. They became extremely defensive, and we both received more than our fair share of stings during the couple of weeks they were queenless. During one inspection, I removed the top cover to be greeted by a thick cloud of angry bees, which came at me so aggressively that it took me a few minutes to be able to see well enough to walk into the woods and shake them off.
Greg had become our mentor, so we followed his advice to give them some time and let the bees work it out. When he and his wife Joan came to help inspect the hive, he said he had never seen bees act as aggressive as mine. They taught me that you can walk into the thick branches of red cedar trees to deter the bees and clear them off you more quickly. The hive raised themselves a new queen and got right back to work, drawing comb, collecting pollen and nectar, and making honey. At the same inspection where I found out the weaker hive had re-queened itself, the stronger hive had filled their first super (the shallow box used to collect honey) and were starting to work on their second. After that visit, we got about two weeks of nonstop rain, followed by about a six week drought with real-feel temperatures hovering between 100-110. It was way too hot to put on a bee suit, and my experience with defensive bees was enough to convince me not to risk going without. I tried to find the shadiest times of the day to do my inspections, but I went two or three weeks without going in the hive between the rain and high heat, and in that time things started to unravel.
It was around mid-July when I opened the first hive to find it had failed. Dead bees, wax moths, and small bugs and larvae had ruined what had been a booming and beautiful bee colony just a few weeks before. I was relieved when the association members surmised that the bees had absconded, or left - at least I didn’t kill them. Still, the failure stung and I was heartbroken over the loss of what had been my strongest hive. The second hive fell not long after. Nearly two full supers of honey were robbed completely dry over the course of a few days, apparently by my own bees who had scoped out a new home and then come back for their things. Insult, meet injury.
Beekeeping is not something you learn on your own. Like I said earlier, you can read all the books and know all the vocabulary words, but the bees are going to be bees. Regional differences in seasonal timing, local flora, pests, and weather patterns make it an intensely specific hobby, and being successful often depends on your willingness to engage with more experienced keepers in your area. As my hives were failing, I consulted with the community of beekeepers I had been welcomed into. Greg’s wife Joan gave me tons of good advice on how to try and save them, and how to move forward once it was clear both hives had gone. The other beekeepers encouraged me. They shared their stories of failure and told me not to give up, this was part of the process. I resolved to try again next year.
This story has a twist, though, and it has really gotten me thinking. Throughout the month of August, I worked to decontaminate the frames and render the wax I’d collected. In that funny way that often happens, for some reason I had been dragging my feet on this task, which meant I still had some frames full of drawn comb when Greg called me up one random Thursday evening. He had too many bees, he said, after an association member had given up and gifted him several hives. He asked if we wanted one. They were gentle bees, much different from what he had seen us dealing with on his last visit. He said he had seen how hard I tried to save our hives, that I was doing everything I could, and he did not want us to give up.
I was over the moon. I dropped everything to get our site ready for a second round of bees. I spent that Friday mowing, clearing, and putting down landscape fabric to deter pests and control weeds, something I had regretted not doing on the first try. Esten jumped in to help me as soon as he finished with work. We picked the box of bees up at eight o’clock the next evening. I had never planned on giving up, but I can’t overstate how much it meant to me that this more experienced beekeeper had seen me showing up, doing the work, and thought I deserved another chance. If I had not sought out this community, I most likely would have failed a lot faster and started next season with much less hope. Time will tell how this next attempt plays out for me. I hope to be successful, but I know the value of the whole experience outweighs any failures along the way.
All of this has been going on throughout the same period where I decided to revive my wire wrapping hobby and create this website, which brought me back into contact with another local business I had a long history with - the crystal shop downtown that always keeps the wire I like in stock. Returning to that familiar place after a few years away from the hobby took me right back to a different community I had found along my path. Similarly, I was not amazing at wire wrapping when I began, but the people in my life supported and encouraged my progress. I found friends with similar interests to keep me accountable and I got better. These experiences got me thinking, and the impact of community became obvious to me. It is easy for us humans to be hard on ourselves, to resent our failures and feel as though we are an island; community, though, is where skills are nurtured and success is born.
When you decide to do something different, some people love to tell you how hard it will be. It won’t make sense to everyone. It’s often true that it will be hard, but at the end of the day what do you want to say you did with your life? The things that are meaningful to you are never a waste of time. It is 100% okay if some, or even most of the people in your life don’t understand the journey you are on. I’ve found that a full and happy life often blossoms at the intersection of many different communities, sewn together by the unique thread of each individual person’s life path. Bees are an excellent lesson in community - they exist to support the survival of the hive, and an individual’s potential pales in comparison to the intricately constructed communities, teeming with life, that they belong to. Bees know how important it is to have a community you can depend on, and each of them works actively, every day, to make that community the best it can be. They show up with the same mission and they find a way to carry it through, reaping the sweet and golden rewards of effective collaboration. I hope I can learn from the bees, and I hope you can, too. If you are sitting on passions that you feel afraid to explore, I hope this story will encourage you to take the leap and find your people. I promise there are communities out there who want the same things as you and will help you along the way, you only have to be brave enough to seek them out. Before you know it, it will be your turn to invest in those who come after you and you will be proud of everything you learned, most of which will likely come from failure.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. There is so much more I could say about beekeeping, about the many blessings in my life and the wonderful people who have pushed and pulled me along the way to where I am now, but I think I’ve said more than enough for today. I’ll leave you with a quote I found:
“He is not worthy of the honey-comb
That shuns the hives because the bees have stings.”
Love & Light,
Lauren
